How to read (and run) a hexcrawl adventure

Got a hexcrawl adventure but don't know what to do with it? I'm here for you!

Transcript

In this video, I would like to help you read and hopefully run a hex crawl adventure. There are two parts to hex crawl adventure. The first part is the hex map, and the second part is the hex key. Let's go over the hex map first. The hex map is a map, and it uses hexes that shows the extent of the adventuring area. This can be a large area or a small area. It's gonna really depend upon your adventure. Symbology on the map will highlight potential features such as terrain types, settlements, lairs, and dungeons, and potentially other stuff as well.

The size of the hexes will vary depending upon your adventure and the system for which that adventure was made. To see the specific contents of a hex, we consult the key for that hex.

Hex keys are arranged by some sort of numbering system. Either individual hexes might be numbered or there might be a grid system. There might be some other sort of reference method, but you're going to ultimately have an index of numbers, codes, letters, and then a key that those codes pertain to that link the hex with the key. Generally speaking, the contents listed at a key for a hex are assumed to be encountered the first time the party enters the hex. They enter a hex. You look up the hex key that will give you the contents of the hex. This is what they encounter the first time they enter. If they happen to enter in subsequent occasions, whether the party encounters those contents is really gonna depend on what kind of contents those are.

If it's a lair or a dungeon, they're probably still gonna be there, though it's really up to you and potentially the party to determine if whatever path they takes takes them to that lair or dungeon. If it's an event, unless it's something that's ongoing, it probably occurred one time on that first visit, and then either the hex will be essentially empty in terms of contents or you can fill it from some kind of generation method. This would be in addition to any kind of wandering creature checks you would make. In terms of contents, the way to think about it is imagine you're prepping for your next session. You decide to roll up some encounters. Instead of placing them in time like you would with wandering encounter checks normally, right, so what happens on your first watch or it happens on your third watch or if we wanna liken it to turns in a dungeon, it happens on the third turn and then the sixth turn. Let's say instead of doing that, you decided to spread them out in space. Maybe this one is two hexes away from where the party is, and this one is one hex away, and this one is four hexes away.

That's essentially what hex keys are doing. The biggest issue that I think GMs run into is the fact that these contents appear extremely static. And I think this starts to get people thinking and, frankly, overthinking what this means on some kind of philosophical level. I think we we complicate it. We wrap it in internal philosophical dialogues, and, ultimately, all this extra thinking, I don't think actually helps us prep or run these hex maps. It just ends up adding a lot of extra extra work, extra complications, or radomness into the mix. Are the hexes too railroady or static? Short answer is no. It's no more static than if you had a dungeon with some rooms that are set.

What dungeon doesn't have some rooms that are set? Railroading is about negating player choice. And just having some events that are happening as the party arrives is not negating any choices. In fact, it's giving them choices because without these sort of encounters taking place in the wilderness, there's not very many decision points for the party. It's going to fall back to, do we keep going straight or do we turn? Which often the party's not gonna have much context for making those choices, so it's just gonna be we go on. These encounters give the party some decision space, some interesting options of things to do besides we go on. If you decide to gate this content behind either some kind of random role or some other contextual mechanic, what you're doing is you're just removing content, reducing the likelihood of them encountering that content at all. Does that seem like it's worth it? And for what exactly? In the stream of play, parties moving, they're making decisions, they're encountering things. If what they're encountering is interesting, what they're encountering presents choices and opportunities, I don't think anyone is going to object that you didn't roll for it on the spot or that it's not dynamic enough.

So be careful if you decide to take this content and put it behind barriers, essentially, especially if those barriers are really meta barriers such as rolling dice because you might be removing content that you never get back again. And if you're buying an adventure to run, don't you wanna have all the content that the author's created for you? I know I do. Let's look at a couple examples. I'm gonna take one that's old and one that's newish. Let's start with the old, and let's start with the Isle Of Dread. The Isle Of Dread is a fairly large map. It's a it's a big volcanic island. If you look at the just the basic map, there's only about 24 keys on the map.

And I didn't go and count the hexes, but that's not a lot of keyed locations for that size of map. So when you get to those keyed locations, given that there's only 24 of them spread across this big map, why would you wanna gate them away? You don't. You wanna present them because, otherwise, the party is just wandering around and then hoping for a wandering creature check. And in a case like the Isle Of Dread where it's a lot of exploration or there aren't gonna be, at least for the first part of the adventure, any specific places that they're trying to get to, you want to present them with data so that they can pick points of interest and so that they can find reasons to adventure. So you look at the Isle Of Dread, and it's fairly important to present in some form the content that it's providing. Most of the hex keys on the Isle Of Dread represent lairs and settlements. Outside of those, wandering creature checks is gonna make up the majority of the content that players are gonna going to stumble into.

Now let's go for a newer example of hex crawl that is Wolves Upon the Coast. Wolves Upon the Coast is denser than The Isle Of Dread and still was less than 50%. There's still a pretty low number of keys for the overall map. With Wolves Upon the Coast, there's a much more of a mix between locations and events. The events often link together, so you find interlinking events. So you will run into something in one hex, and it relates to stuff happening in other hexes. And you could build these little adventures or just little stories that are happening as the party encounters one element of a of a story, and then they encounter the next element and the next one. And they don't have to be in a particular order. You might find one piece and then you find another piece, but you end up getting all these pieces and you could put them together, solve the puzzle a little bit of what's happened. It's a neat bit of history of world building. Oftentimes, there are fun interactions there. But all that stuff requires that you get all the pieces.

If you limit the amount of pieces that the party can collect, they're not gonna be able to put that puzzle together. And a lot of these locations, you're only gonna visit one time. It's important that you maximize the amount of content that's in each one of these hexes, if there is any, because you're not gonna get there again. If the richness in this world is developed through these little stories, you're cutting out pieces of the puzzle. You're essentially cutting the story. Let's talk about how to set yourself up for success. First, read the adventure. Read it. Not just the hexes, not just the keys, but also any kind of guidelines they give about things like hex sizes and travel distances, all the assumptions that the adventure you're reading is going to have because all of that's going to be important for at least how you are to interpret the adventure.

And as you get more comfortable, you'll be able to make decisions in your brain about what you think will work better for your system and your group and just the way you do things. But you want at least wanna know the parameters of what the adventure how the adventure is constructed. When it comes to hexes themselves, you need to absorb those contents yourself. You want to take the contents of the hex, take the context of your session, and synthesize it into your presentation. Let me use an example from The Isle Of Dread. This is the ogre lair. This burial chamber is the home of five ogres. That's all you get.

There is more, but all the more stuff is descriptions of the interior of the cave. But none of that tells you how the party gets to the lair, what the lair looks like, how close they are to the lair. That's all content that you are going to have to figure out from how the party's operating. If the party is running away from a pterodactyl and they're just stumbling as fast as they can running, not looking really where they're going, they might just bounce into a clearing, and there's your ogre lair. They might be being careful and wary and checking for traps and trails and all kinds of stuff. In which case, when you get into the hex with the ogre lair, you as the GM are gonna have to know there's an ogre lair here. What does that mean? That means most likely we're gonna see ogre tracks. We're going to see other traces of these ogres before we just get to the cave.

I don't think of ogres as being very sneay, secretive creatures. There's probably gonna be a lot of evidence of their ogres around their cave. So before they get to the cave itself, I'm probably gonna narrate running across tracks, maybe piles of refuse, maybe markers, or any sort of thing that's going to indicate that maybe there's some kind of creature here. They might not know it's an ogre. It's something that's probably humanoid, something that's probably large, and at least semi intelligent that's hanging around in this area. So that would be how I would first present that hex. And then depending on how the players respond to that, maybe they'll find their way to the lair or maybe they won't. They might see large humanoid tracks and kill sites and things and nope out of there, and that's totally fine.

Or they might be itching for a fight, itching for some loot, in which case they're gonna try to take those tracks that they found and follow them to their source, in which case, we'll narrate getting to the Ogre's Lair. But all that content is stuff that I am generating along with the party's decisions, the players, based upon the key, which in terms of the exterior is just an ancient burial lair is home to five ogres. So I don't wanna read that out right away. I need to take a minute. I haven't internalized it already. Read it in, figure out what it's telling me, and then figure out what are that information is telling me is pertinent to what the party's doing in the hex.

Let's go to Wolves Upon the Coast for another example. This one is an event. Eight mummies bound together with bronze chain trudged through the water and mud. Each has had their lower jaw removed, tongues elongated with gold weights. They move to try and encircle prey before hacking them to death with their with flint axes. There is 15 foot of chains between each mummy. Each has 350 silver pieces worth of golden jewelry, necklaces, piercings, bracelets, rings. Elsewhere in the area, dead pitch diggers hacked to death.

What am I gonna do first? I'm just gonna read this out loud because not all that information is pertinent to the players, and I need to figure out based on what the context of what the party's doing, what they're going to see. I might roll a die to see whether they find the dead pitch diggers first, where they are in relation to the hex depending on what direction they're in. I might also have to be determined by how aware the party is or how careful they're being. Like with the ogres, if they're running and stumbling, I might roll a die. If they're being careful, I might have them get to the pitch diggers first. Maybe they end up following a trail, and that trail leads to the eight mummies.

There are many ways to play it out. Are the mummies forever marching in place until the party shows up? No. But it's assumed wherever the mummy started their march that they're at this point on it when the party gets there, and it's fine. This will not be here the next time the party shows up. Presumably, the mummies have moved on. Presumably, the dead pitch diggers have been swallowed up. We can play with that depending on how long it's been since the last time they were there and, of course, what they did. Maybe we decide that the mummies are going around in a circle, so they still will be there. And the party didn't deal with them last time, so they're still there.

And maybe instead of pitch diggers that have been hacked to death hacked to death, some other animal, some other inhabitant, some other unfortunate has been hacked to death. We can figure this stuff out. However, what we need to do is look at that event, determine whether they've seen it before in the hex, determine how they're approaching that event, how whatever that approach they're taking, whatever that context is, how it determines the nature of their first observation or initial interaction, and then do that.

Let's go over quickly summary. Read the adventure. Absorb the contents, which hopefully you're internalizing a bit through reading the adventure, but, of course, you're not gonna memorize the whole thing. So you're reading up as they're moving along, as they're moving into hexes. You're gonna read the contents to yourself. Use the context of play with whatever those contents happen to be, synthesize them together into the information you present to the players, and then, of course, you're gonna listen for them to respond with their actions, and then you're gonna have that great dialogue. Don't forget the mechanics, whether they're from the adventure itself, the system you're running, some combination, other sources. Keep those in mind. They're also important.

When you're synthesizing the context of what the party's doing to the content of the hex, that is gonna introduce a lot of dynamism. Even though we just have something that seems very static, like it's something that's just sitting on pause, waiting for the party to show up and unpause, what's going to make that dynamic is that no two parties are gonna be doing the same thing. No two parties are gonna be coming from the same direction. Everything's gonna be different. How the parties are acting, how they're interacting, what their particular situation is. Are they at full health and itching for a fight? Do they have packs full of treasure and they're just trying to get back to the nearest safe spot? Is it night? Is it day? Did you roll a wandering creature check? Does something is something else going to show up at the same time that this other situation is unfolding? All these things will add dynamism. I don't think you're going to lack for dynamic play in a hex crawl just because it's got hexes that are keyed with events that are waiting for the party to trigger them. Just look at them as pre prep, pre baked prep for your GMing pleasure.

I think that's it. I don't think I have too much else to say about it. In terms of running the hex, read the hex, read the stuff, know your system, know your adventure. When the party acts, react, vice versa, it really is not that much different than a dungeon. There's no walls, of course, so there might be barriers. Have fun. Enjoy. I love hex crawls. That's why I named my channel after them. So I hope this helps you read the adventures. I hope that reading them and thinking about them in this way will help you run those adventures. That's all I've got, everybody. Run more hex crawls. Read more hex crawls. Game on, and I'll talk to you later. Bye now.